COVID-19: 100,000 deaths likely by Memorial Day in the United States

As of May 20, 2020 more than 93,000 deaths in people laboratory-confirmed to have COVID-19 have been reported in the United States and more than 1.5 million persons have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. All 50 states have now begun partially reopening.

It is likely that this coming Monday, the number of confirmed deaths will reach 100,000, adding even further poignancy to Memorial Day 2020.

The world’s first “flu+COVID Winter” starts next month in the southern hemisphere. The U.S.and the other nations in the northern hemisphere will, hopefully, pay close attention to what happens from June to August in the southern hemisphere for multiple reasons.One of these reasons is to gain insight into the world’s first flu+COVID winter before it occurs next December-to-March in the northern hemisphere.

Daniel Lucey, M.D. MPH, FIDSA, FACP, is an infectious diseases physician and adjunct professor of infectious diseases at Georgetown University Medical Center, a senior scholar at the Georgetown University O’Neil Institute, Anthropology Research Associate, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Global Health Committee.He has served as a volunteer medical responder to outbreaks that included the West Africa Ebola crisis. He has collected information on outbreaks starting in 2001 with cases of anthrax in 2001, and including smallpox vaccination 2002, SARS 2003, H5N1 Flu 2004, MERS in 2013, and Ebola in April, 2014, He has gathered, and updated information on the spread of the coronavirus here since Jan. 6.